Jeff Weise, teen
slayer of ten, including himself, at the Red Lake Indian reservation in
northern Minnesota, was on Prozac, prescribed by some doc. How did the consultation
go? "Here Jeff, take these, they may help you get over life's little
problems, like the fact that when you were 8 your dad committed suicide
and when you were 10 your cousin was killed in a car wreck that left your
mom with partial paralysis and an injured brain. And let's face it, Jeff,
most likely you'll never get off the res. You're here for the rest of your
life." Cut to a shot of the doc holding up a Prozac bottle, like the
kindly fellow in the white coat and mirrored headband in 1950s Lucky Strike
ads, telling us that Luckies were a fine way to soothe a raspy throat.

The minute the high command at Eli Lilly, manufacturer
of Prozac, saw those news stories about Weise you can bet they went into
crisis mode, and only began to relax when Weise's websurfs of neo-Nazi sites
took over the headlines. Hitler trumps Prozac every time, particularly if
it's an Injun teen ranting about racial purity. How many times, amid the
carnage of such homicidal sprees, do investigators find a prescription for
antidepressants at the murder scene? Luvox at Columbine, Prozac at Louisville,
Kentucky, where Joseph Wesbecker killed nine, including himself. You'll
find many such stories in the past fifteen years.

By now the Lilly defense formula is pretty standardized:self-righteous
handouts about the company's costly research and rigorous screening, crowned
by the imprimatur of that watchdog for the public interest, the FDA. And
of course there's the bogus comfort of numbers; if Lilly's pill factory
had a big sign like MacDonald's, it could boast Prozac: Billions Served.

Each burst in the sewage pipe brings a new challenge
to Lilly's sales force, which has had some heavy hitters down the years,
including George Herbert Walker Bush (onetime member of the Lilly board
of directors); former Enron CEO Ken Lay (onetime member of the board); George
W. Bush's former director of the Office of Management and Budget, Mitch
Daniels (a former senior vice president); George W. Bush's Homeland Security
Advisory Council member Sidney Taurel (a Lilly CEO); or the National Alliance
for the Mentally Ill (a recipient of Lilly funding).

At the turn of this year there was a five-alarm incident
when the British Medical Journal went back to the 1994 Wesbecker suit against
Lilly, reminding the world that the company had been involved in some shifty
footwork involving a back-door payoff to the plaintiffs in a deal that successfully
excluded from Judge John Potter's courtroom the regulatory case history
of Oraflex, a highly compromised Lilly product, which displayed the company's
supposed disclosures to the FDA in an unpleasing light.

Lilly rose to the challenge, successfully persuading
gullible journalists that the real story concerned a lonely freelancer writing
for BMJ and not a powerful pharmaceutical company with a huge advertising
budget. The press dutifully shifted its focus from Lilly's outrageous efforts
to suppress evidence to the narrow question of whether a piece of evidence
had really been in the public record in the years since 1997, when Judge
Potter changed his verdict to "dismissed as settled with prejudice,"
very far from the victory Lilly had been claiming.

That's the trouble with time, as Paul Krassner joked
about Waldheimer's Disease, which is when you get old and forget you were
a Nazi. But it's never too late to review the origins of the Depression
Industry in the late 1980s, and the saga of what happened after three Lilly
researchers concocted a potion in the mid-1970s they christened fluoxetine
hydrochloride, later known to the world as Prozac.

Long years of rigorous testing? When Fred Gardner and
I investigated the selling of depression and Prozac in the mid-1990s, we
found that clinical trials excluded suicidal patients, children and the
elderlyoalthough once FDA approval was granted, the drug could be prescribed
for anyone. According to Dr. Peter Breggin, the well-known psychiatrist
who analyzed the FDA's approval of Prozac, it was based, ultimately, on
three studies indicating that fluoxetine relieved some symptoms of depression
more effectively than a placebo, and in the face of nine studies indicating
no positive effect. Only sixty- three patients were on fluoxetine (fluoexetine
hydrochloride was branded as Prozac in the mid 70s) for a period of more
than two years. By 1988 the National Institute of Mental Health had not
only put the government stamp of approval on corporate-funded depression
research but had created a mechanism whereby government money and personnel
could be employed to stimulate demand for corporate products.

Psychiatrists--a breed whose adepts, so stated a study
published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry in 1980, commit suicide
at twice the national rate--have been central to the entire enterprise.
The process linking their sorcery to the corporate bottom line has a robust
simplicity to it. As Prozac came off Lilly's research bench and headed for
the mass production line psychiatrists labored to formulate a multitude
of bogus pathologies to be installed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
of Mental Disorders, whose chief editor in the 1980s was Robert Spitzer
MD, an orgone box veteran and adept copywriter skilled at minting new ailments
for late twentieth-century America and sanctioning treatment, medication,
state funding for the requisite pills (no expensive consultative therapy)
and reimbursement by insurance companies.

When detailed research showed likely linkage of Prozac
to violent acts. Lilly-liveried psychiatrists were there to douse the flames
of doubt. In 1991 the FDA's Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee
met to decide whether Prozac should carry a warning label about links to
suicide. Five out of the ten panel members (eight of whom were shrinks)
had active financial interests in the drugs the committee was investigating,
and all voted against requiring a warning, their obvious conflicts duly
sanitized by the toothless FDA. Other shrinks in the hire of the drug companies
urged ever wider application of Prozac to remedy social angst, inclcluding
plans for compulsory Prozac-dosing of youngsters.

In 2000, when hundreds of farmers in the Indian state
of Andhra Pradesh were committing suicide because of neoliberal policies
that had destroyed their livelihoods, the state government announced it
was sending out a team of shrinks to determine why the farmers were depressed.
The implication was that these people were mentally unstable. But in India
credulity about the causes of depression is not so far advanced. The plan
provoked a storm of ridicule, and in the elections that followed the Andhra
Pradesh government, darling of Western neoliberals, was duly trounced.

No such happy chance in the United States, where government
is in the pay of drug companies and prescriptions for antidepressants have
long since taken over from political manifestos that would cure depression
by collective social action. How they must have cheered at Eli Lilly when
the Senate wiped out Chapter 7 of the bankruptcy statutes, fostering family
violence, heightened crime and a vast new potential market for Prozac and
kindred potions at the stroke of a pen.

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